My players were genuinely freaked out by this Alien RPG Starter Set, which plays up the dread nicely

GamesRadar+ Verdict

Hope's Last Day remains as impactful as it ever was, and a superb entry point to Free League's Alien, horror gameplay, or just TTRPGs broadly. Filled with beautiful maps and accessories to bring the experience to life, the most I can quibble about is the occasional redundant mechanic that can be easily overlooked – otherwise, this is Free League's rightly-celebrated work doing what it does best.

$37.99 at Amazon Pros

• +

  A masterful sense of tone and chilling horror

• +

  A comprehensive set of resources and accessories to carry into future games

• +

  Mechanics are lean, easy to learn, but substantive

Cons

• -

  Hope's Last Day is a pretty short adventure

• -

  Chances for roleplay feel fairly thin

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• Features & design
• Gameplay
• Should you buy
• How we tested

The Alien RPG is back! Or, if you're somebody like me who's been playing it regularly, it never really left.

The original Alien tabletop roleplaying game by Free League was pioneered by a starter one-shot called "Hope's Last Day," back then given out as part and parcel of the core rulebook. But now that Alien has been reinvented for a second, Evolved Edition, Hope's Last Day has also been rebuilt for that experience, with a whole new Starter Set to go with it, giving players the chance to leap directly into the fray with one of the best tabletop RPGs and experience a new era of grisly cosmic horror, and maybe also the chance to squash a xeno with a – wait, they didn't include the Power Loader?! Zero stars!

Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set features & design

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Price

$30/£26

Ages

10+

System

Year Zero Engine

Players

2-6

Lasts

3-5hrs

Complexity

Moderate

Designers

Dave Semark, Matthew Tyler-Jones, Tomas Härenstam

Publisher

Free League

Play if you enjoy

Call of Cthulhu, Ten Candles, Dread, Free League's Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game, Traveller

• A full set of nuanced game maps and accessories for play
• Enough rules to play this adventure, and not much further than that
• A lot of useful tools to meet inexperienced players halfway

The Alien Starter Set has pretty much everything that players need for a taste of the broader Alien RPG experience, and arguably a little extra. There's a short adventure – the aforementioned "Hope's Last Day" – a full set of dice, a truncated version of the rules, some character sheets, tokens featuring a lot of pale, worried characters, genuinely superb game maps, and even some cheat sheet handouts for the most common rules, so people don't have to keep asking the Game Master for help. There's even a little plastic Xenomorph mini! Cute. Well, cute-ish.

(Image credit: Future/Joel Franey)

To clarify, this is absolutely everything you'd need to play the attached module comfortably, though it's certainly not going to cover the full scope of the experience outside of the starter set. That might sound obvious, but some similar kits have a little more flexibility, allowing you to stretch what's there beyond the limits of the box. In this case, I'd say not so much – you can definitely use the tokens and cheat sheets for your own games, but the rules are slashed to the essentials without an ounce of fat, and there's only a few options for enemies and items included. What's here will serve you amply when it comes to running Hope's Last Day, but it'd be tough getting traction beyond that without buying the core rulebook.

Gameplay

(Image credit: Future/Joel Franey)

• A superb escalation of tension across three acts
• Not a huge amount of opportunities for RP
• A major emphasis on vulnerability and quick fights

So let's talk about Hope's Last Day (from here on abbreviated to HLD). This adventure was originally a bonus extra included with the 1st Edition Alien RPG core rulebook, and oddly enough this rewritten version for the Starter Set feels a bit smaller, despite now having the starring role. That's not inherently bad – it's a slimmer form of what was there before, for better and worse.

In both versions, HLD takes place mere hours before the events of the second Alien movie, in the very same Hadley's Hope colony that would so famously push 1986 Sigourney Weaver to her limits. Players commandeer a group of workers who are returning to the colony from a survey expedition, only to come back to a war-torn outpost overrun by slinking horrors, the outbreak having occurred in their absence. The adventure quickly becomes an escape mission, one complicated by individual secret agendas designed to place the players at odds with one another. After all, it goes without saying that somebody will have to play a Weyland-Yutani douchebag trying to box up a live facehugger. Would it really be an Alien story otherwise?

A universe of horror

(Image credit: Future)

There are plenty of other tabletop Alien experiences out there if you want a different flavor of terror. Alien: Fate of the Nostromo is an accessible yet tense recreation of the original movie, while Nemesis is an original IP based on Alien that takes the idea to the next level. It's truly fantastic.

With both incarnations in front of me and having run both of them, I can comfortably say that this is broadly the same adventure, but a little leaner and more focused. Chances for RP are a little thinner, but the pace is quicker and more control is placed in the hands of the Game Master – or "Game Mother", to use the appropriate terminology. Either way, the tone shifts organically from creeping tension in the opening act, as the players try to work out what's going on, to full-on action in the finale as they flee the growing horde of slathering atrocities.

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If you want to know what's different to the original in terms of rules – well, our Alien RPG Evolved Rules review will give a broader summary, but a few pointers: stress is now tweaked and a little more thinly spread, so players don't start screaming and shooting guns in the air when they forget their computer password, and both players and enemies have generally had their durability toned down, resulting in high tension firefights where every attack could be fatal – a change that makes the fear all the more palpable.

Speaking from experience, my players were genuinely freaked out by the first act, which plays up the dread nicely. And that isn't even punctured by the reveal of the xenomorphs, as a single slobbering xeno managed to do enough damage and leave enough of an impression in a brief skirmish to make the players terrified of a second encounter. All participants agreed afterwards that it was one of the best horror TTRPG experiences they'd ever had in years of play, though were split on the aforementioned character agendas – less experienced players found them to be useful, while veterans saw them as unnecessary.

Should you buy the Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set?

(Image credit: Future/Joel Franey)

Bluntly, yes. If you've not played Free League's Alien before, this is probably the best entry point to one of the best TTRPGs out there. I'd say the Evolved Rules are only marginally better than the previous edition, but that's a marginal improvement over what was already a genuine masterpiece. Though I doubt anybody would need more than a couple of sessions to run Hope's Last Day, it's still a great module and lifting off point. Grab, savour it, and try to resist the urge to immediately buy the core rulebook afterwards. I can't lie to you about your chances on that score, but… Oh, you know the rest.

Ratings

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Criteria

Notes

Score

Game mechanics

Lean but never shallow, the Alien RPG's mechanics and stress systems remain a benchmark for all other horror tabletop games.

5/5

Accessibility

You don't have to know Alien to understand this simple narrative – and it may even accentuate the terror to go in blind.

4/5

Replayability

Though it can be used for multiple player groups easily enough, there's no reason for the same players to come back to this specific one-shot, sadly.

2/5

Setup and pack-down

Characters come pre-made for players, and though there's a lot in the box, it's never unmanageable.

4/5

Component quality

Gorgeous maps and tokens, with all manner of useful extras and components that can work in future games.

5/5

Buy it if...

✅ You love hard science fiction and cosmic horrorFrom something slithering in the vents, to a mutilated body slumped in a chair – Hope's Last Day has something to squeeze terror out of your players at every turn, and the mechanics support that nicely.

✅ You want a snacky, digestible experienceIf you want a one-off evening of fun, Hope's Last Day could probably be finished in four hours, the tension escalating across that time.

Don't buy it if...

❌ You want a power fantasyThere's not even any big guns for players to pick up in HLD, and half of it is about monsters playing cat and mouse with the frightened players. If they want to be swashbuckling space marines holding off the horde, there's games more suited to that.

❌ You want something to play long-termThough you could retrofit the small sample of rules for your own games, Hope's Last Day won't last more than a couple of evenings. Ultimately, this is a great experience designed to convince you to buy the full rulebook.

How we tested the Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set

(Image credit: Future/Joel Franey) Disclaimer

This review was conducted using a sample provided by the publisher.

I ran the Hope's Last Day module for two separate groups of players, following the rules as written as closely as possible. One group featured very experienced TTRPG players, the other less so, with one or two exceptions. I'd like to thank Benjamin, Elliott, Alex, Phoebe, Heather, Serena, Amy, Matt, my girlfriend Elizabeth, and Egg the Jack Russell for their involvement.

For more on our testing process, see the wider GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

For more recommendations, don't miss the best board games or the best card games.

Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set: Price Comparison $37.99ViewWe check over 250 million products every day for the best pricespowered by Joel FraneySocial Links NavigationGuides Editor, GamesRadar+

Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and Very Tired Man with a BA from Brunel University, a Masters from Sussex University and a decade working in games journalism, often focused on guides coverage but also in reviews, features and news. His love of games is strongest when it comes to groundbreaking narratives like Disco Elysium, UnderTale and Baldur's Gate 3, as well as innovative or refined gameplay experiences like XCOM, Sifu, Arkham Asylum or Slay the Spire. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at Eurogamer, Gfinity, USgamer, SFX Magazine, RPS, Dicebreaker, VG247, and more.

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